


if you would lay your armor down

by dropofrum (95echelon)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Porn With Plot, Pure Smut, cersei lannister deserves more hugs, for the good of the realm, look this is just filth, these two need to bang like a screen door in a hurricane
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2018-12-29 21:28:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12093798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/95echelon/pseuds/dropofrum
Summary: But when he is with her, the King in the North isn't'honorable'at all.





	1. Chapter 1

Aerys murders Rickard and Brandon Stark. And the proud Northern lords spit on the Targaryen name, their Mad King and his worthless son, and name Eddard Stark King in the North.

In the end, it changes nothing, because the song is written and already done; but in the beginning, it changes the course of war.

* * *

 

 

"Eddard Stark will ride into battle with Robert Baratheon, and when they win-" and Cersei notes how her father says _when_ and not _if_ , as though their victory is a foregone conclusion, now that they have raised the Lannister and Tully and Arryn banners to ride with them, "They will both need queens." There is a look in his eyes that she mislikes, and- _No_. If she were to wed the Baratheon boy, he wouldn't have mentioned Eddard Stark, not even in passing. No, no, he wouldn't, he _wouldn't-_

He would. Tywin loved the _idea_ of a daughter, a sweet, docile bargaining chip, far more than the flesh-and-blood lioness who had grown in his home, and Cersei knows he would.

"And which Queen will I be, father?" Cersei mocks. "The one behind the Iron Throne?" Her heartbeat is so loud, she can't hear herself speak, voice climbing higher, fiercer. "Or the one you send to exile? That's what you did with Tyrion's pretty whore wife, wasn't it? Tore apart her pretty cunt, and sent her North to die?"

As it turns out, Tywin Lannister does not take well being mocked. The mark of his hand does not leave her cheek for seven days and seven nights, and afterwards, Cersei does not question him again. She is not his favourite, as it turns out, even though she is _smarter_ and colder and sharper than both her _idiot_ brothers put together - no, Cersei Lannister is a **_pawn_** , to be carted off to the frozen North so her father may trade on the power of her precious, virgin _cunt_.

That night, she lets Jaime fuck her for the first time. It only hurts a little.

* * *

 

 

They send Cersei to Winterfell ahead of the rest of the wedding party.

"Spend some time with Lord Stark," he says. ' _Accustom yourself to your new prison,_ ' Cersei hears.

And she vows nothing - _nothing_ \- will stop her from finding a way out. Tywin Lannister will not break her. Eddard Stark will not break her. She is a Lannister, a lion of Casterly Rock - _she will not break._

'Come away with me,' Jaime whispers to her the night before she departs for Winterfell, his cock still buried in her cunt, his forearms braced on either side of her face. His chest is slick, gleaming with sweat, and in the firelight, her brother looks like he could've been cast from Lannister gold.

'We'll take a thousand golden dragons, and a ship, and we'll sail for the other end of the world. Qarth or Lhazar or Myr-'

Cersei laughs, mocking and breathless, hips rocking up to meet his, watching him as his breath falls quicker, before he's fucking her in earnest, all plans of exile lost to the rhythm of his blood. She drags his mouth to hers, scraping her nails down his back, and kisses him furiously, tasting wine and smoke and _Jaime_.

If he thinks she will run away, like some idiotic _child_ throwing a fit, condemning herself to spend the rest of her days on some forgotten spit of the world, perhaps even he doesn't truly know her at all.

* * *

 

She is in the solar, when Ned Stark comes to greet her, a week after her arrival, tired lines bracketing his mouth, dark stubble along his jaw. He wears a greatcloak, dark, rough fabric that sweeps the ground, wolf pelt about his shoulders, leather braces strapped across his chest, stamped with snarling direwolves.

Another war council, it seems, and Cersei despises the fact that she knows this - knows the way he looks when his patience has been tried repeatedly. She knows things about him now - that he likes his ale dark, that he wields his Valyrian sword like a fluid extension of his own arm, that he spends long hours in the godswood every night. That he never smiles.

When he looks at her, he stops in his tracks; Cersei fancies that he stops breathing altogether.

 _Good_ , she thinks viciously, knowing the effect she has on men. On _him_. She wears red, a bold, striking silk, the cut defiantly southron, and when Eddard Stark's jaw tightens, she feels a little shiver of pleasure curl in her chest. Her hair tumbles in long, amber waves, thin braids framing her crown, the ends brushing her small waist, and her eyes are the green of emeralds, jade, the rolling acres of Highgarden plains. Between her breasts hangs a golden medallion, the metal cool against her skin, an enormous lion rearing towards the sky. Hear me roar, Eddard Stark. _Hear me roar._

He looks back up at her, mouth in a flat, thin line, grey eyes colder than the North that named him King. When he turns on a heel, storming out of the room just as quickly as he had entered, cloak billowing about him, Cersei allows herself a solitary smile. 

She is not his. She will never be his.

* * *

 

 

The wedding is primitive. They have no septon; only Eddard and Cersei and their small group of witnesses gathered in the godswood. They recite their pitiful, crude vows before the bloodied face of the 'heart tree', and between the moments where Eddard unclasps her golden Lannister silk, and replaces it with a heavy, grey cloak, Cersei feels almost painfully naked.

She turns back to him, a Stark in his eyes now, and she wonders if a vow spoken before gods she doesn't keep means anything at all. Eddard Stark's dark, somber eyes meet hers, unsmiling, unaffected. They call him the Quiet Wolf. ' _Quiet_ ,' as if that's supposed to be a _compliment_ \- and a brilliant, fiery new emotion grips her, blazing through her spine with new steel: _she hates him._ By the old gods and new, she _hates_ him.

It pushes her shoulders back, this blood-red new emotion, it lifts her chin higher, flares her nostrils wider - and Cersei thinks she sees something flash across Eddard Stark's dull, bored face in response. A smile, almost. The downward flicker of his eyes, when her posture pushes her breasts higher, the swell of her cleavage swelling against the deep Southron neckline.

But that can't be right. _The Quiet Wolf,_ she scoffs in her mind, her face as impassive as her new husband's. She must be mistaken.

* * *

 

 

The feast is raucous, and the bedding ceremony is as horrific and demeaning as she had ever imagined; all these drunken, rough-handed Northmen eagerly stripping away their lady's clothing, pawing at her tits. Jory Cassel sweeps her off her feet, and she hears him growl at an enterprising Manderly lordling who wants a feel of her 'pretty, golden cunt,' striding towards the king's bedchamber. She catches Jaime's eyes just before they leave the Great Hall, from behind the shelter of Cassel's arms, his beautiful green eyes flat and dead, a flush from too much wine rising up his neck. Another _Tyrion_ , she thinks damningly. Another spineless fucking _coward_.

 _Men_ , she snarls in her mind, keeping her face still, unfazed. What in the gods' names is the _point_ of them all?

Cassel deposits Cersei in the room, with a brotherly pat on her arse that makes her whip around to glare at him. But he merely chuckles and pulls the door shut, and when Cersei turns back to the room, Eddard Stark is already there, lounging back on the bed, naked and dour-faced, watching her impassively, even though his cock is hardening. He wraps a hand around himself, tugging lazily, roving down the length of her body. His eyes gleam with a lazy, hidden hunger.

He isn't like Jaime, this Northman; his shoulders are broader, his chest thicker with muscle, rippling in hard, flat planes down his stomach. A thick mat of hair covers his chest, his forearms, his calves, springy and dark, and Cersei tries to imagine feeling of that against her breasts when he moves above her, swallowing back a surge of revulsion. She _hates_ this, hates her father, hates **_him_**.

But Eddard Stark gets up, pads quietly to her. He doesn't try to kiss her, and Cersei regrets that. It would have been lovely if he had - the chance to bite down on his insufferable, quietly smug mouth, to slap him away, to withhold herself from him, to deny him the pleasure of her body.

"I don't want to do this, tonight," she tells him, colour rising to her cheeks, letting her eyes glitter with unshed tears. He is ' _honorable_ ,' they say. He won't force her, even though he should. He needs this marriage far more than she. But he is good, and gentle and kind, and kind men are easily managed. "I don't- I don't know you-" She looks away from him, as if she can't bear it anymore. "And I don't _want_ to."

He doesn't reply.

Instead, he runs a warm, calloused hand down the side of her body, drifting lightly over her nipple with his thumb, tracing her neat waist, the flare of her hips. "That's a shame, your grace," he murmurs, his eyes fixed on her mouth, watching her lips shape her reply.

"What?" she asks, sharply, looking at him once more. She is nearly his height, she realizes. It isn't that he's tall, the reason why he takes up all the space around her; it's his presence, crackling and barely leashed. He reminds her, with a jolt of fear that she has to fight to mask away, of Tywin Lannister. " _Why_?" 

His eyes turn hard, and he steps closer, heat rolling off him in waves. "Because **_I_** want to," he replies, voice reduced to a snarl.

 _The Quiet Wolf,_ Cersei thinks, and she can't help the shiver that breaks through her like a cresting wave. When he does bend, it is to kiss the side of her neck, to mouth at the ridge of her collarbone, nip roughly at the top of her breast. It is this last thing that makes her stumble, banging her head painfully against the door, black spots dancing in her vision as Eddard Stark falls to his knees. He grins openly at her discomfiture. His grey eyes crinkle up, lips canting slyly to the side, and when he buries his mouth in her cunt, it is all she can do to clutch at his impossibly broad shoulders, pressing a fist to her mouth so he won't hear her beg, and hold on. 

* * *

 

He's careless with her, the way Jaime wouldn't have dared, hands rough and quick and sharp. He tugs her thigh over his shoulder impatiently, mouth working tirelessly over her clit, fingers burying themselves deep in her cunt, and when her nails sink into the back of his neck, he moans around her, the vibration rumbling though her. She doesn't know when her eyes fell closed, when her hands escaped her mouth - she doesn't know when she began to rock against his mouth like a bitch in heat, frantic for release.

  
When her eyes fly open, he looks up at her, smirking, jaw gleaming with her wetness. There is a flush to his cheeks, and his eyes are dark with hunger. "I thought you didn't _want it,_ your grace," he jeers, but the words are breathless enough to take the sting away, to make Cersei grind down harder, her hand cupping a naked breast, rolling a nipple between her fingers, watching the way his rhythm stutters, his eyes go wide.

  
She tugs her nipple until it turns scarlet, cupping and caressing, and his grip on her thigh becomes brutal, painful, nails digging into soft, unmarked skin. He curls his fingers inside her, and Cersei's mouth falls open, head bowing as she shudders silently against the door, her climax washing over her in a hot, surging crest.

  
He stands then, abruptly, fingers pulling out, her thighs slick, reddened from his stubble, and while she's still panting, body sticky with sweat and exhilaration, he kisses her, the taste of her cunt still on his mouth, his wet fingers drawing lines of heat across her body.

  
When he carries her to the bed, his cock red and swollen, his breath rapid and shallow, possession and lust vibrating just beneath his skin, Cersei does not protest.

* * *

 

 

_to be continued_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning and the end of a war.

 

 

"So," Eddard says, after they've caught their breath. "Who was he?"

Cersei almost doesn't hear him, over the roar of her heartbeat, the sweet languid honey pulsing through her veins. Her muscles ache pleasantly, and the place between her legs is slick, sopping wet with his mouth and her wetness and his seed. 

"Hmm?" she asks, fingers running absently through the soft furs beneath her, her hair splayed in a golden pool around her face, lips drawn in a slack almost-smile. 

Eddard turns onto his side, to face her, and she doesn't look at him. His hand runs lightly up her body, fingers dipping into her reddened cunt, long wet lines tracing up her belly, along her sternum. He thumbs her nipples, and Cersei flinches away, sore and hurting just a little. 

Eddard chuckles, and pinches harder, and watches his pretty new wife whimper, her nostrils flaring angrily as she slaps his hand away. "Who was he?" Eddard asks her again, and now Cersei stiffens. 

"What are you talking about?" she retorts, forcing a bored drawl that she thinks he might see through. 

He rolls atop her, one arm sliding under her waist, the other forearm braced around her pillow, and Cersei watches the veins in his arms pop, crude and bulging, and the memory of him above her, working deeper and harder into her cunt burns through her body, as her hips rising up without her permission. Eddard notices, and smirks, and Cersei has to fight away her flush. 

"Your lover, little wife," Eddard remarks, nosing at the side of her neck, his body covering hers, hard and heavy, possessive, his cock hardening against her stomach already. His voice rumbles against her skin. "The man who fucked you before me. Who was he?"

Fear surges like wildfire through her- she thought she'd faked it well enough, the pain of having her missing maidenhead breached. She hadn't bled when Jaime had fucked her the first time, so how could he _tell?_ Her heart trips out of control, and when Eddard finally, _finally_ kisses her open mouth, all teeth and tongue and wolfish savagery, she forgets to put up a fight. 

* * *

 

 

He takes her again that night, slower and sweeter and harder, each thrust punctuated by her whimpers, his groans, his forehead braced on her shoulder, his back arched up so it feels like their bodies meet at only these two points, his cock inside of her, his breaths falling hotly on her breast. 

She doesn't come, the second time, but it doesn't matter. The second time is almost better than the first, because this time it is he whose arms tremble just before he spends, her name escaping his lips like a man at prayer. She rakes her nails down his back, cupping the hard, flat plane of his buttocks, squirming and clenching on his cock, hot, molten pleasure radiating through her.

It's better, because this time, she doesn't beg. 

* * *

 

 

Eddard leaves for the Trident the next morning, a hard kiss on her mouth in the courtyard, a hand sweeping down the flat plane of her abdomen. Cersei wore red again today, but when he saw her, his thin, sour mouth only quirked up in a grin, eyes burning down her body insolently, lingering at the apex of her thighs, the swollen pout of her lips, the bruises littered down her neck. He didn't care if she wore Lannister colors, not after he'd marked her and fucked her, and the impotence of itburned. 

Another man might have asked his new wife to be safe, before leaving for battle. To be well, to write him if she could. Eddard is not other men, and his parting words are ominous. 

"Do you pray, my queen?"

Cersei arches a brow. "No," she replies, sharply. "But I might make an exception for you."

Eddard chuckles, noticing how she doesn't say whether she'll pray for him to live or die. "Make an exception, my lion queen," he murmurs, stroking her cheek with the backs of his fingers. "Pray that if you are with child, you carry for all nine months from today. And pray that the child looks like _me,_ and not like... anyone else."

Her heart thumps painfully in her chest, and she imagines a little boy like Jaime, with golden hair and emerald eyes, handsome and brave and beautiful. She imagines the child evanesce into smoke. "Or what?" she asks, hating how afraid she is, hating that he makes her this way. 

Eddard kisses her again, lingering this time, a calloused arm tightening around her waist and dragging her body to his, tongue dipping into her mouth in shallow licks, an obscene parody of the way he'd suckled her cunt last night. Around them, soldiers and bannermen call out crude, ribald cheers, and Cersei fights against the urge to shove him away, to pull him close, to kiss him as wildly as he kisses her. When he lets her go, she's gasping for breath, her vision swimming, and she staggers back into his arms, weak as a newborn foal. 

"Do you really want to know, Cersei?” he rumbles, his big, rough hands moving possessively down her spine, openly squeezing the curve of her arse, dropping careless kisses at her temple, breathing in the warm, lemony scent of her hair. "Do you really what to know what I'd do to another man's child?" he asks, and she shivers in his arms, despite the weak summer sun beating down on her back from the east. 

It is the second time he's said her name. 

* * *

 

 

She orders her quietest, most loyal handmaiden to prepare moon tea, in secret, in her own rooms, sneaking the ingredients from the cupboards at the kitchens, where the servants keep a small stock of the required herbs. She drinks a potful every day for a week, and her moon blood still doesn't come three weeks later. 

The maester examines her later that week, and with a kindly, benevolent smile, Luwin pronounces her pregnant. And Cersei curses the child in her belly, for being stupid enough to _live._  

* * *

 

 

The child is stillborn; blue-skinned when it leaves her womb as Cersei gasps in a pool of her own blood, the bed linens soaked through to the mattress, her throat raw, her scalp heavy with sweat. When she holds the small, glassy-eyed corpse of her dead son, she does not cry. She does not know how to feel. Where her heart should be, there is nothing, nothing, only a bleak, empty darkness, and the shadow of a scream. 

Cersei does not speak. Cersei does not weep. 

She has never, _never_ been so alone. She has never needed Jaime more. 

* * *

 

 

She names the child Joffrey, her dead, golden-haired babe, and sends his bones to be buried behind the sept at Casterly Rock. No child of hers will rest in Winterfell's cold, empty crypts; not if she has anything to say about it. 

* * *

 

 

The war ends. For Cersei, nothing changes. Nothing has changed, for so long. _So long._

* * *

 

 

Eddard is by his warhorse, when she descends the stairs and walks out into the courtyard, the stallion stomping its feet impaitently, as stableboys dart around it, unloading saddlebags and coaxing it to the stables.

She wears black, when she meets him; a black gown of soft, thick wool, black cloak lined with luxuriant sable, black boots of polished leather. With her golden hair pulled back severely from her face, and no jewellery save for the Lannister pendant nestled between her breasts - Cersei knows the picture she paints.

She looks like a queen.

* * *

 

 

Not to Ned.

To him, she looks like death. 

Her cheekbones are sharper than before, he notes, a fearsome, feline cut to her gaunt face. There are bruises under her eyes, like she hasn’t been sleeping, and her lips are dry, colorless. _Gods,_ Ned thinks, striding to her, cupping the side of her face and watching her blink slowly, as if she can’t quite register the touch of his skin on hers. 

“Your grace,” Cersei murmurs, and when Ned breathes in, he tastes the scent of her, cloying, _painfully_ sweet, and a shocking, underlying pungency. She’s been taking milk of the poppy; dosing herself, likely, she's- _gods_ , what has she _done?_

“Cersei,” Ned mutters, dropping a kiss to her foul, soft mouth, her lips like dry parchment under his, fear and nausea blazing through him. “Cersei, you little _fool._ What did you _do_ to yourself?”

Cersei smiles, a slow, wide stretch of her lips, and Ned watches in fascinated horror when the cracks in her lips open up in wounds, little lines of red streaking through her mouth. “You’ll be pleased to know, your grace,” she says, her green eyes dull and unfocused, staring at a point past his shoulder. “I killed the bastard I was carrying. Your heir will be a true Stark.”

And Ned realizes there isn’t a chance in hell he can tell her about Jaeh- _Jon._ Not yet; and when he does, he certainly can’t call the boy his own. There’s no telling what she’ll do - to Ned, to herself… to the babe. 

He’s brought a lion to the North, Ned realizes with dawning horror, the sharp edge of grief widening like a river in his heart, and he remembers the old song they still sang in the Westerlands of the fallen House of Reyne. 

_A lion still has claws._

* * *

 

 

 

 

Eddard lays down beside her that night, a knee raised up, his head pillowed on his arm. He does not attempt to touch her at all, but the heat of his body is a living thing in the confines of their bedchamber, trickling over her like a foreign invader and Cersei feels a gnawing itch at the back of her throat. 

_Go away. Go **away. GO A-**_

"Did he love you?" Eddard asks, abruptly, shattering the silence that has enveloped them. He must have found out then, that the babe was born early. And though it was common enough for new mothers to birth early, Eddard knew better… Eddard knew the child could very easily have been a bastard.

Cersei presses a hand to her broken womb, feeling her heart thump through her abdomen, and holds in her- her tears? Her screams? Her fractured, _awful_ rage?

"Yes," she says, her voice rough, and a tear trickles out from the corner of her eye, disappearing into her hairline. 

Eddard exhales. "And you?" he asks, after a long pause. "Did you love him?"

Cersei thinks about Jaime, her sweet, beautiful Jaime, stripped of his white cloak now, and sent back to Casterly Rock, heir to Father's precious fucking legacy. She thinks of the name she's heard them whisper all day - when they think they're being discreet, the treacherous cunts. _Kingslayer,_ they whisper gleefully, shooting furtive, mocking glances at their new, young Queen. 

_Kingslayer,_ they say, as if the man he'd killed hadn't been unfathomably evil. As if Jaime hadn't spared them all the dishonor of killing Aerys Targaryen, by taking the mad king's blood on his own hands. 

She thinks about his eyes, so like Joffrey's, the bright emerald of a new spring. His smile, brighter than the sun. His kisses, sweet and fierce and unhurried, as if he could drink from her mouth till the end of times. 

She thinks of those eyes turning hard, the night of her wedding, the ale-slackened tilt to his mouth when the Northern lords stripped her of dress and dignity, and he watched on, impervious. 

_Did you love him?_

"No," Cersei replies, and realizes with a searing, _painful_ jolt that it... It was the _truth._

She turns onto her belly, and runs her hand down Eddard's arm, watching his fingers twitch in surprise. Maybe something in her broken, Cersei muses idly, as Eddard turns to her with careful, wanting eyes. 

Maybe, she thinks, as Eddard steals a kiss from her parted lips, and another, and another, slow, burning kisses that bite and tease and _yearn,_ maybe she just _can't_ fall in love. 

* * *

_to be continued_

**Author's Note:**

> title adapted from taylor swift's 'story of us' bc lol why not.  
> thanks for reading, and remember to hit kudos if you liked it!


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